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Ghana Without Filters · Diaspora · Long read

This is the part of Ghana's slave history that is not on the tour.

Where the captives actually came from. Who profited, from the northern raids to a merchant's house in Osu. Why Ghana receives the world's largest homecoming pilgrimage on a fraction of the trade. And why the descendants of the people who were taken are still the poorest citizens of the country that sells their story.

Start with the word

Forty kilometres inland from Cape Coast there is a river called Donkor Nsuo. Every guidebook translates it as "Slave River" and moves on. Sit with the word a moment longer.

Donkor, plural nnonko, meant a slave. It also came to mean a northerner. The two meanings collapsed into one word, and stayed collapsed, and the collapse itself is the history. If the word for "slave" becomes the word for "person from the north", that tells you who was being sold, by whom and for how long, more precisely than any document.

The word is on the signboard at Assin Manso, a site visited by tens of thousands of diaspora travellers a year. Almost nobody reads it that way, and nobody at the gate explains it.

Where the captives actually came from

Not the coast. The coast is where they were sold, not where they were taken.

They were marched from the savannah: from what is now the Northern, Savannah, North East, Upper East and Upper West regions, and from beyond, out of present-day Burkina Faso and further. They were Gonja, Dagomba, Grusi, Gurma, Builsa, Sisala, Kusasi, Frafra, Mamprusi and Wala. They walked hundreds of kilometres, in chains, in the dry season, through country most visitors now fly over on the way to Mole.

They were gathered at camps like Pikworo near Paga and at markets like Salaga, the great inland trading centre of this traffic. Today Salaga has no visitor economy, no funding and no place whatsoever in the pilgrimage built on what happened there. From there they went south, through Assin Manso, to Cape Coast and Elmina, and out.

When Asante conquered Gonja and Dagomba in the 1740s, the tribute was set partly in people. That is not a controversial reading. It is in the standard histories, and it is taught at the University of Ghana.

The trade inside a private house: Richter House, Osu

The castles are the stone face of this history. But the trade also lived in private homes, family firms and marriages. The clearest example in Accra stands a short walk from Osu Castle (Christiansborg).

Richter House, often called Richter Fort, was built around 1807–1809 by Henrich Richter (1785–1849), a Euro-African merchant and the son of the Danish official and trader Johan Emanuel Richter. By the early nineteenth century he was one of the most powerful private traders on the Danish-controlled coast. His house was more than a residence. It was a fortified trading base, with thick walls and room for hundreds of workers, both free and enslaved.

Now look at the date. Denmark had banned its own slave trade by a decree of 1792, which took effect on 1 January 1803. Richter's compound went up after that date, beside a Danish castle whose officials were supposed to enforce the ban. Local tradition and some researchers describe an underground passage linking the house to the castle's dungeons, a way to move captives out of sight and beyond Danish oversight. Parts of it are sealed or collapsed, and it has never been fully excavated, so treat the details with care. But the principle it stands for is documented and not in doubt: the machinery of slavery extended well beyond the official forts, into the homes and enterprises of the mixed merchant families who lived beside them.

The Richters were not unique. Accra's Euro-African families, among them the Bannermans of Jamestown, whose James Bannerman later served as acting governor of the Gold Coast, were the coastal elite of the nineteenth century. They were born of European fathers and Ga or Fante mothers, educated, wealthy and politically powerful, and they lived in the trading world that the forts created. Their names are still on Accra's streets and in its old families today.

Read more on our Osu site: Richter House, Osu: a hidden stronghold of trade, power and slavery, The Two Faces of Osu and the 300+ castle slaves buried beneath the courtyard of Christiansborg.

Ghana was never the main source. Not close.

Here is the fact that reorganises everything, and it is not obscure. It sits in the standard database that every historian of the trade uses.

Of roughly 12.5 million people embarked across the whole Atlantic trade, around 5.7 million left from West Central Africa: Angola, the Congos, Gabon. That is the largest single source region by an enormous margin. The Bight of Benin, the Dahomey coast, accounts for roughly two million more. The Bight of Biafra sent vast numbers of Igbo people. Senegambia sent its own.

The Gold Coast, today's Ghana, accounts for roughly 1.2 million, about one in ten.

Be careful with that, because it cuts two ways, and the distinction matters. The people who walked through Assin Manso and out of the door at Cape Coast were overwhelmingly from the Gold Coast and its northern hinterland. Those were local doors for local captives, and nothing on this page reduces what happened in those dungeons by a single person.

But at the scale of the whole Atlantic, Ghana was a mid-sized participant in a system whose centre of gravity lay fifteen hundred miles to the south-east.

For African Americans specifically, Gold Coast ancestry is a minority ancestry. The dominant origins for arrivals in North America were West Central Africa, the Bight of Biafra and Senegambia. Most African Americans who fly to Accra to stand in a dungeon are standing in a dungeon their ancestors almost certainly never entered.

Ghana has already said all this. Out loud. Repeatedly.

If you think this page is a foreigner attacking Ghana, look at the record.

• 10 August 1999: Nana Boa Amponsem, the Denkyirahene and then President of the Ghana House of Chiefs, publicly and officially apologised to Africans and people of African descent for the role of pre-colonial chiefs and elders in the trade.
• 2006, Project Joseph: a national initiative inviting the diaspora back, framed explicitly as an apology for Ghana's role. It was named after the biblical Joseph, the man sold into slavery by his own family. Ghanaians chose that name.
• 2007: President John Kufuor, in London, rejected the idea that Europe bore sole responsibility, saying that "some local indigenous groups were also guilty".
• 2022: Nana Obokese Ampah I, king of Asebu, issued a public apology to the diaspora for the actions of his kingdom's rulers during the trade.
• Throughout: Professor Akosua Adoma Perbi of the University of Ghana, Ghana's permanent representative on UNESCO's Slave Route Project, has documented indigenous slavery in this country more comprehensively than anyone alive.

Note what is missing from that list: a formal apology from the Ghanaian state itself. Chiefs have apologised. A president acknowledged it abroad. A national tourism programme was named after a man sold by his brothers. But there has been no government apology, and the honest reason is that it would sit awkwardly beside a reparations argument directed at Europe.

That is a shame, because the reparations case does not need the selective version. As a Ghanaian commentator put it better than I can: an argument built on partial history is weaker than one that confronts the whole record.

What would actually change it

Not guilt, and not less pilgrimage. Ghana should absolutely keep receiving the diaspora and should be proud that it does. Four things would change it, all of them achievable.

• Tell the northern half at the coastal sites. The guides at Cape Coast and Elmina are excellent, but their script begins at the door. It should begin at Salaga. Add ten minutes and a map, and the whole story changes shape.
• Put Salaga, Pikworo and Richter House on the route. Properly funded sites in the north, linked to Assin Manso, the castles and the merchant houses of Osu as one journey, would spread the revenue to the regions that supplied the people, and make the pilgrimage complete rather than partial.
• Stop selling ancestral certainty. "Welcome home" is beautiful, and for most African American visitors it is also geographically unlikely. The honest version is more moving, not less: your ancestors probably left from further south; we kept the memory for all of you; you are welcome here.
• Say it at state level. The chiefs did it in 1999. A country that named a national programme after Joseph can finish the sentence.

I have run websites about this country for twenty-five years, and I did not write this to diminish it. I wrote it because the version currently sold to the diaspora is a marketing narrative wearing the clothes of history. The people paying for it deserve better, and so do the people in Bolgatanga, Tamale and Salaga whose ancestors were the cargo and whose grandchildren get nothing from the retelling. You can love a place and refuse to lie about it. That is the entire point of this website.

Read further, and check me

Do not take my word for any of this. Read Ghanaian scholarship first, because Ghanaians got here long before I did.

• Akosua Adoma Perbi, A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th Century (Sub-Saharan Publishers, Accra, 2004). The foundational work, based on the most comprehensive oral history project on slavery carried out in any single African country.
• Emmanuel Akyeampong, "History, Memory, Slave Trade and Slavery in Anlo (Ghana)", Slavery and Abolition.
• Rebecca Shumway, The Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
• Ivor Wilks on Asante state formation and the northern tribute.
• Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: an African American writer in Ghana finding that the locals saw her as a foreigner, and that the complicity went unspoken. She wrote it two decades ago, and it still stings.
• The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org), where the embarkation figures come from. Look them up yourself. It takes five minutes.

Sources: Embarkation figures from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Apology dates from contemporary Ghanaian press reporting and published records. Visitor numbers from the Ghana Tourism Authority. Richter House from the author's own research on osucastle.ghana-net.com, drawing on The Nana Project, the Journal of Modern Slavery, The World (PRX) and Quartz Africa. If you find an error in this piece, write to us and we will correct it in public. That is how this site has worked since December 2000.

Written by Remo Kurka, Ghana-Net.com · First published 14 August 2026 · Updated and fact-checked: 5 November 2026